Style

Style
Tone:

• Diction + Imagery = Tone
• DIDLS: "Diction, Imagery, Selection of Details, Language, Style"
• Irony/Satire: Used to comment on society, create extreme versions of specific traits as a way of drawing attention to them and making fun of them to make a point
• Connotation/Denotation: Words with innate emotional responses/feelings
• The danger of judgemental terms (hard, complicated, amazing, genius): Adds opinion to the piece, makes it less factual and more emotional
• Notes from connotative scale and “Waiting” rewrite lesson:
  • Changing the connotation of the words used in the "Waiting" story completely change the tone of a story. Adding positive terms and happy language creates a feeling of optimism or happiness in the otherwise unfortunate story.

Selection of Detail:

• Other literary terms this encompasses: Choice of diction
• What it means to “name a category” and why this is important: Repeated words/images of the same theme the author uses and how
• Epithets: (This word has been on the test for the past three years.)
• Verisimilitude: The appearance of being truthful or real
• Notes from Dombey and Son lesson:
  • The category of nature and the world in Dombey and Son represent how Dombey Sr. views the world as revolving around himself and his son, they describe nature as something subservient to themselves

Imagery:
Common Broad “Category” Names:

• Auditory: Different sounds that relate to each other, continuously used
• Visual: Similar images
• Gustatory: To evoke the taste of
• Tactile: Relates to the sense of touch
• Olfactory: Pertains to the sounds of hearing
• Kinetic: Sense of touch, feeling and temperature
• Organic: Imagery of the personal experiences of a person's body
• Dark and light: Represent one thing as being "good", one thing as being "bad"
• Juxtaposed: Contrast to represent the similarities and differences in something
• Notes from Dombey and Son lesson:
  • Organic imagery and visual imagery when describing nature and how it all revolves around himself and his son
  • Juxtaposition between his son, glowing and hopeful and himself

Figurative Language:

• Metaphor: Stating that something is another thing
• Simile: Stating that something is like another thing
• Hyperbole: An exaggerated statement
• Understatement: Stating something is way less significant than it is
• Personification: Giving something not alive the abilities/traits of something living
• Synecdoche: A part of something represents the whole of something "I will take her hand in marriage"
• Metononmy: When you use something closely related to an object to represent an object "The White House said today..."
• Paradox: Something that seems impossible
• Apostrophe: The writer directly addresses someone dead/absent, or an object unable to respond
• Possible “category” tie-ins: When there is figurative language, there is often comparison to something and if the figurative language compares things to some category specifically (Animals, nature) that fits in with the categories
• Notes from “One Art” Lesson:
  • Categories: all of the objects lost, all of the places lost, all of the people lost
  • Object representing a person: The watch that represented losing her mother

Point of View/Narrative Control:

• First Person: Creates the situation where it must be decided if the narrator is trustworthy or not
• Second Person: Tells what "you" are doing, basically a cookbook giving instructions
• Third Person Limited: tells what characters are doing, but not thoughts
• Third Person Omniscient: Knows everything, trustworthy, tells what is happening inside of the character's head
• Stream of Consciousness
• Narrator Reliability: When first person, reader must decide if the narration and information is reliable
• Notes from Point of View Lesson:

Organization (Including Use of Time)

• narrative structure: Story refers to the raw materials of dramatic action as they might be described in chronological order.
• flashback: The story is happening previously in time, someone is looking back
• framed story: The story is a story within a story, a giant extended flashback, Life of Pi
• formal: Exposition, complicated incident, rising action, it follows the basic storyline
• informal: The formal storyline blows up, you get information in a scattered way, unpredictable
• sonnet forms:a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter
• villanelle:a nineteen-line poem with two rhymes throughout, consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with the first and third lines of the opening tercet recurring alternately at the end of the other tercets and with both repeated at the close of the concluding quatrain.
• ballad:a poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas.
• couplet:two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit.
• tercet:a set or group of three lines of verse rhyming together or connected by rhyme with an adjacent tercet.
• quatrain:stanza of four lines
• Notes from Native Guard Lesson:

Literary Terms Analyzing Contrast

• Verbal Irony: Sarcasm, someone says the opposite of what they mean
• Situational Irony: There is a discrepancy between what is expected to happen and what actually happens
• Dramatic Irony: The reader knows something that the character does not
• Oxymoron: Two seemingly conflicting words placed together
• Paradox: Something that seems impossible
• Juxtaposition: Two people/things/images placed together to show the contrast/comparison between them
• Notes from “For Julia in the Deep Water” Lesson:
  • Paradox: She was doing nothing, and nothing was harder
  • Dramatic irony: We knew she was just swimming, but it seemed like she was in immense danger
  • Oxymoron: Her mom was drowning in air

Sound (or Musicality) Descriptors:

• euphony: Pleasing to the air, smooth, light
• cacophony: Chaotic, loud, crashing
• smooth diction: Sounds that are moving air through them
• harsh diction: Sharp consonants where we press mouth together and move air through
• Avoid the use of “flowing” and never use “diction” without a descriptor: Using diction is basically saying they are using words, needs a description
• Notes from “For Julia, In the Deep Water” Lesson:
  • Uses euphonic diction in describing the water and with the rhyme scheme, and uses smooth diction to create a musicality in the poem that defies the harsh ideas of leaving your children to fend for themselves

Sound Devices:

• alliteration: Repetition of the same sounds
• consonance: Using the same consonants sounds over and over
• assonance: Using the same vowel sounds over and over
• onomatopoeia: the word version of sounds
• Notes from “For Julia, In the Deep Water” Lesson and Robert Frost’s “Mowing”:
  • 
    

Rhyme:

• formal: ABAB rhyme scheme, alternating rhyming words
• informal: Unexpected or not patterned rhyme
• traditional: Predictable rhyme, generally has a name
• unconventional: Rhyme without a known pattern or name
• absence of: no rhyme scheme

Is it free verse?

• Notes from “One Art” Lesson:
  • Villanelle structure, formal and named structure

• Meter or Prosody: patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry
• Iambic pentameter: a line of verse with five metrical feet, each consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable
• Metric feet: Made up of stressed and unstressed syllables
• Notes from Hamlet soliloquy Lesson:

Allusion

• historical: Allusions to great historical events
• literary: device in which the writer or speaker refers either directly or indirectly to a person, event, or thing in literature
• Biblical: Adam and Eve, snake, knowledge, common and overly used themes used to invoke the same feelings as the images in the bibe
• Shakespearean: Romeo and Juliet remakes, using the tragic love story, allusions to Shakespearean plots
• pop: Allusion to another thing in pop culture (a book, movie, song)
• Mythological: Reference to mythology (Percy Jackson is one big Mythological Allusion)
• Notes from Dombey and Son:
  • Biblical allusions are used to show that Dombey views himself as the center of the world
  • Create a category to So-What the tone

Also, within the Greek tragic tradition be aware of ideas such as:

• dramatic unity: Rules for drama: should follow one plot, occur over no more than 24 hours, exist in a single physical space
• hubris: Excessive pride or self confidence
• catharsis: a process of releasing extreme emotion
• Notes from Dombey and Son Lesson:
  • Dombey Sr. had excessive Hubris making him think that the whole world begins and ends with him and his son, he ignores the others and his dying wife and only focuses on himself and how his son can continue his legacy

Repetition

• words: Repeated words are used to stress the importance of that word
• images: Repeated images are used to represent or draw attention to some other idea in the work
• structural: Creates a sense of unity in the poem, creates the rhythm
• grammatical: creates a sense of movement
• rhetorical (i.e. anaphora, etc.) Used to avoid repetition
• Notes from “One Art” Lesson:
  • One Art repeats lines and words throughout the poem to emphasize the significance of nature and losing as well as to hint at the irony of her trying to convince herself about the nature of losing and it shows her eventual truth as she varies her repetition at the end.

Sentence Types

• loose: a type of sentence in which the main idea (independent clause) is elaborated by the successive addition of modifying clauses or phrases.
• periodic:Has the main clause at the end
• parallel: the repetition of a chosen grammatical form within the sentence
• chiasmus: a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form
• inverted word order: Verb before the subject
• Notes from “Waiting” Lesson:
  • Longer sentences can create a relaxed structure, shorter sentences create a rushed feeling, different sentence types change the way the writing is perceived

Punctuation:

• Period (also called “full stop” or “caesura”): Creates a sense of shortness/abruptness, urgency
• exclamation point/question mark (“exclamatory caesura” or “interrogative caesura”): Adds emotion and feeling to the writing
• comma: Creates a sense of fluidity
• colon: Before a list
• hyphen vs. em dash: Use to join concepts, create unity
• Notes from “Waiting” Lesson:
  • Different punctuation and sentence structure can alter the tone of a piece of writing

Characterization

• direct: Tells the audience exactly what the personality of the character is
• indirect: Uses the character's speech and actions to hint at the personality
• flat: Relatively uncomplicated, do not change
• round: Complex and show development, surprise the reader
• static: Characters with no growth or change in personality
• stock: Character following an exact stereotype
• developing: Characters that change and grow
• epiphany: A sudden realization
• Notes from Dombey and Son Lesson:
  • Dombey Sr. is a flat character who does not grow and change over the passage, he is directly characterized when he is described as being old, ugly, slow and is indirectly characterized as Dickens uses his actions and self praise to show his arrogance and obsession with legacy. The wife is a flat character as she is unimportant and does not change

Setting

• place AND time: place and time contribute to the story by giving the initial feeling of the story (Sunny=joyful, happy, where couldy=gloomy, depressing)
• Notes from “Waiting” Lesson:
  • Changing the name of the town, the name of the streets and the description of the school changed the tone of the Waiting story, making it more optimistic or more depressing as the connotation of the name of a place changes how the readers think of it.